Over the last 20 years, facsimile (fax) has been a successful means to transmit documents electronically. With the emergence of Internet and e-mail, it appeared as though that fax would be rapidly replaced by the e-mail. However, it is now clear that the two technologies will co-exist for a while.
FIG. 1 shows present-day deployment of fax machines in an office environment equipped with Internet messaging. A fax server 2 is connected to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) 4 by a plurality of dedicated lines, such as T1/E1. The PSTN 4 is the “outside world” as far as the fax server 2 is concerned and is the source of incoming faxes as well as the sink of outgoing faxes. The fax server 2 is also connected to a packet network 6 which provide connections to a plurality of users (e.g. 16). In this way, the fax server 2 enables corporations to provide desktop faxing capabilities to employees via e-mail architectures such as Exchange, Notes, SMTP, and other backend applications. The fax server 2 can also used to provide fax-back transaction confirmation, fax broadcasting or automated form processing.
The fax server 2 requires specialized interface cards 14 for providing the conversion between fax information sent by the users. When the document arrives at the fax server 2, the fax server 2 converts the document into a format that is suitable for transmission over the PSTN 4. Finally, the fax server 2 sends the converted document over the PSTN 4 via its dedicated interface cards 14. Conversely, for a fax arriving at the fax server 2, the fax server 2 identifies the destination user, converts the incoming fax transmission into a format suitable for delivery to the destination user, and sends the converted document to the destination user over the internal IP network.
In a common enterprise of today, the users are not only connected to the fax server 2 via the internal IP network 6, but are also connected to an to internetworking gateway 8, which connects the internal IP network 6 to a global Internet 12. The gateway 8 allows a user 16 to communicate electronically with other parties (e.g. 18) connected to the global Internet 12. Such electronic communications may include store-and-forward messages (e.g., e-mail), real-time one-way communications (e.g., live TV), real-time two-way communications (e.g., Internet telephony, etc.).
The gateway 8 is typically connected to an Internet Service Provider 10 (ISP), which is basically a larger gateway or the PSTN. The connection between the gateway 8 and the ISP 10 or the PSTN is typically established via dedicated T1/E1 lines, similarly to the connection between the fax server 2 and the PSTN 4.
It is apparent that a first set of dedicated T1/E1 lines are required to provide fax functionality and a second set of dedicated T1/E1 lines are required to provide Internet access functionality. The use of two sets of dedicated telephone/Data lines is expensive to maintain and, moreover, it is possible to experience the situation in which either set of lines is idle while the other set is being used at its maximum capacity. In such a situation, the capacity of the underused set of lines goes to waste. The requirement for dedicated hardware for interfacing with the PSTN translates into a further non-negligible expense for the enterprise.
It is therefore desirable to provide a new system that can harmoniously integrate a fax based communication tool with other communication tools though IP network.